Just Work?

Today I was just going about my work: buying Gatorade (the red kind) and mixing jello (the green kind) for my sick husband; trying to get Tori to eat her peas and carrots (and then cleaning up the peas and carrots she threw on the floor); training Jack to obey “right away, all the way, and with a happy heart” (and “quietly” when we’re in the library, please!) and write this post.

Then Mom sent me this quote by Charles Bridges:

"It is most important habitually to contemplate our work in its proper character as a “work of faith.” As such, it can only be sustained by the active and persevering exercise of this principle. This is what makes it a means of grace to our own souls, as well as a grand medium of exalting our Divine Master.

It is faith that enlivens our work with perpetual cheerfulness. It commits every part of it to God, in the hope, that even mistakes shall be overruled for his glory; and thus relieves us from an oppressive anxiety, often attendant upon a deep sense of our responsibility. The shortest way to peace will be found in casting ourselves upon God for daily pardon of deficiencies and supplies of grace, without looking too eagerly for present fruit."

Faith transforms my work. I can find forgiveness for my impatience with the kids, I can have hope that my training efforts will not be in vain, I can wait patiently for the evidence that what I am doing for my family is doing some good after all, and I can be “enlivened with perpetual cheerfulness.”

Most of all, faith makes the laundry, the dishes, the editing, the diaper changing, the praying, and the care-giving a means of grace to my soul and a means of exalting my Savior.

It isn’t just work anymore. It’s a “work of faith.”

--from the archives